formation

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. The act or process of forming something or of taking form.

n. Something formed: beautiful cloud formations.

n. The manner or style in which something is formed; structure: the distinctive formation of the human eye.

n. A specified arrangement or deployment, as of troops.

n. Geology The primary unit of lithostratigraphy, consisting of a succession of strata useful for mapping or description.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. Something possessing structure or form.

n. The act of assembling a group or structure.

n. A rock or face of a mountain.

n. A grouping of military units or smaller formations under a command, such as a brigade, division, wing, etc.

n. An arrangement of moving troops, ships, or aircraft, such as a wedge, line abreast, or echelon. Often "in formation".

n. The process of influencing or guiding a person to a deeper understanding of a particular vocation.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. The act of giving form or shape to anything; a forming; a shaping.

n. The manner in which a thing is formed; structure; construction; conformation; form.

n. A substance formed or deposited.

n.

n. Mineral deposits and rock masses designated with reference to their origin

n. A group of beds of the same age or period.

n. The arrangement of a body of troops, as in a square, column, etc.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. The act or process of forming or making; the operation of composing by the union of materials or elements, or of shaping and giving form; a putting or coming into form: as, the formation of a state or constitution; the formation of ideas or of character.

n. Disposition of parts or elements; formal structure or arrangement; conformation; configuration: as, the peculiar formation of the heart; a formation of troops in columns, squares, etc.

n. That which is formed; anything considered as to its form, structure, or arrangement: as, the formation consisted of a mass of incongruous materials. Specifically

n. In geology, properly, a group or assemblage of rocks, whether stratified or unstratified, having a similar origin or some common physical character.

n. In the classification of rock-masses as adopted by the United States Geological Survey for cartographic purposes, the cartographic unit, or usually the ultimate rock body separately named and mapped.

n. In œcol., a plant society or association. See the extract and plant formation.

If Obama, Axelrod and Plouffe can do the job of getting this message to stick (by getting their soldiers in formation and marching with it through the weekend talk circuit and not screwing it up) it just might have a chance to do some damage to the ever stalling right.

If affixation means forming a word by adding an affix (e.g. frosty from frost, refusal from refuse, instrumentation from instrument), then back-formation is essentially this process in reverse: it adapts an existing word by removing its affix, usually a suffix (e.g. sulk from sulky, proliferate from proliferation, back-form from back-formation).